Ashni Biyani – Director of Future Group, Success Story
Ashni Biyani
Biography of Ashni Biyani is worth reading. She is daughter
of Kishore Biyani, got herself involved in the innovation and incubation division
of Future Group at a young age of 22. She did her schooling at Queen Mary, studied
at HR College in Mumbai, and did a course in textile designing and design management
from Stanford and Parson’s School of Design. It was only three years ago that she
joined the Future Group, but Ashni Biyani ate, slept and breathed retail ever since
she was born - retail was in her blood. Another bonus is that she has many mentors
and guides within Future Group guiding her. She attended the strategy sessions of
the company with her father and cousins in her teens. “Initially, I didn’t understand
a word of what was being discussed, but started absorbing things slowly. They have
become a part of me ever since,” Ashni says, with visible passion.
Ashni Biyani joined Future Group first as design manager
of Future Ideas, the innovation and incubation cell of the group and later became
director of Future Group. Ashni is not involved in any operational role as it’s
not something she wants to do, but is rather more interested in identifying key
themes that can build consumption. Since the last year or so, her main job has been
to ‘imagine the future’ of the current format of the Big Bazaar stores and give
design inputs. And all this is being done keeping the cost factor in mind as money
is finite. "I watch the cost in whatever I do," the daughter of the Rs 10,000-crore
Future Group founder and CEO says. Ashni says she has a team comprising of 11-members
which includes mythologists, sociologists and anthropologists - people who have
studied the nuances of Indian community behavior - and uses these insights for designing
stores, launching new products and planning marketing initiatives. She says her
team has learnt a lot from the publishers of the Kalnirnay almanacs, which throws
a good deal of light on every single religious or community festivals of every large
community. That helps the group develop marketing initiatives based on these local
festivals. The sole idea behind this is to capitalize on the trend of Indian consumers
to reserve big-ticket purchases during auspicious days. This has led Ashni to her
idea of setting up Big Bazaar Family Centers, which are large-format stores measuring
more than 80,000 square feet and which focus a lot on the food and cultural habits
of local communities. According to Ashni, if one can comprehend the different communities
in the country, their customs, festivals, belief systems and other nuances that
bind them together, a retailer’s job is almost done. "Our recently launched Ektaa
brand will do precisely that," Ashni says.
The Big Bazaar in Malleswaram is yet another example of this community-based retailing
idea. The Malleswaram store has been designed keeping in mind that the store belongs
to the community within which it exists. So, the store has 65 varieties of pickles,
45 kinds of papads and about 50 types of rice. There is even a cart selling plantains
inside the store, a scene very familiar to Bangaloreans. And then there are community-connect
initiatives like ‘Anna Santharpane’. It started off in Mysore with organizing lunches
for people (they need not be customers) to be served by Big Bazaar employees on
every last Friday of a month - another breakthrough of Ashni and her team. The customers
are given an option to donate any amount in lieu of the lunch and that donation
is given away to local charities. Though not a strictly business initiative, the
charity lunches have resulted in a 25 per cent increase in monthly sales and are
now being rolled out across all stores in South India.
All this planning explains the 12-hour work schedule that Ashni maintains. At Malleswaram,
for example, she and her team worked on the community store idea for over six months,
visiting neighbourhood families to study their consumption patterns and the smaller
nuances of life around the locality.
Ashni Biyani believes that one has to begin from the ground level
if you want to succeed in retail sector. She says she doesn’t really worry about
the designation that she has and that’s where the Biyani surname helps. She can
seamlessly move on to different kinds of roles without anybody minding her intrusion.
The other good part is she gets enough mentors who are willing to help out. For
example, she says, she had no clue about numbers two years ago. Her mentors have
made sure that she can now figure out a balance sheet quite fast, which has helped
her to ‘live a quarter-on-quarter life’. "The family
was a little taken aback when I actually joined and thought I was having fun," she
says. But the drastic changes which she has brought in the retail sector of Future
Group will indeed help it boom in the coming days and Kishore Biyani seems to be
obviously happy with his decision to push her daughter into the business.
